This event is supported by a grant from the Emily List Fund for the Arts and we will also be offering a therapeutic dance workshop with Maria Mitchell for special needs youth. Get in touch with Linda at lmciner@gmail.com for more info.

Event

MY BRONX

Old Deerfield Productions presents a new interdisciplinary theater piece called MY BRONX by Terry Jenoure on July 12, 13 and 14 at 7:30 pm at the ARTSBLOCK on 289 Main Street in Greenfield, MA. Tickets are $15 and are available at the door, but please come early for best seating.

The piece features original music and poetry by Ms. Jenoure. Maria Mitchell, renowned New York dancer, and acclaimed drummer Bob Weiner will both accompany her in this dynamic piece. McInerney says, "This piece is brave, expansive, intense, musical, playful, vibrant, and brimming with color and texture. The stories are woven together like a tapestry moving from past to present, while bringing the audience on a ride through her memory. It is an amazing amalgam of forms all emanating from Terry. She celebrates her Jamaican and Puerto Rican roots, her Jazz mastery, and her poetry, all while dancing with her hand-sewn dolls on the imagined streets of her transplanted home: the Bronx. You have never experienced anything like this show. MY BRONX will leave a song beating in your heart and a desperate need to grab a pencil to write your own story."

In performance, MY BRONX offers an alchemical interplay between structure and improvisation. Using her own flexible format to communicate her ideas to the other performers, Ms. Jenoure says, "I've made maps for the drummer and dancer that are independent of cues from the poems. It challenges the traditional roles of soloist and accompanist. Each artist works in her/his own world, but together, the effect gives birth to surprises." In MY BRONX, Jenoure's love for stories gives voice to the ways transplanted cultural and familial threads reweave in a new place. And most exciting, her compelling tale waves us on to tell our own!

The performance will be enhanced by an expansive art installation consisting of handmade mixed-media dolls, some life sized, some tiny, that Ms. Jenoure has crafted and that are incorporated into the choreography and set. The dolls will be available for sale, as will a book of her poetry.

McInerney commissioned MY BRONX through her production company Old Deerfield Productions, "I've wanted to create with Terry for many years. She has been performing all around the world while living in Greenfield so she is well known in Europe but not in Western Mass. I wanted to build a piece that connects her many geniuses. She's a writer, a fabric artist, a dancer, a violinist, a singer, and a great thinker. I wanted to bring all these parts together on one stage and then share that fusion of her with our community. We've never seen anything like Terry Jenoure; strap on your seatbelts!"

MY BRONX will be offered in conjunction with a therapeutic dance workshop for special needs youth by Maria Mitchell, location and date TBA. A grant from the Emily List Foundation will be used to cover the cost of presenting the workshop. MY BRONX is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council and Greenfield Savings Bank.